


under the sun

by parhelions



Category: LOONA (Korea Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, F/F, Non-Graphic Violence, Steampunk, pilots!lipsoul
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-25
Updated: 2020-04-25
Packaged: 2021-03-01 17:28:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23830840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/parhelions/pseuds/parhelions
Summary: Jungeun first saw the girl in the hangars, leaping from cockpit to asphalt with grace.
Relationships: Jung Jinsol | Jinsoul/Kim Jungeun | Kim Lip
Comments: 12
Kudos: 83





	under the sun

"I feel like the moon is a jellyfish," Jinsol said, mouth full of pork chicharrones. "A big, happy jellyfish. Don’t you see it?"

"Not really," Jungeun supplied. She didn’t look up. Sleep was eminent, tugging at the edges of her vision from where she sprawled on her bed, toes nestled in the cotton blanket. 

"Why not?" A rustle of cloth, then another crunch. Like a retributive beagle, Jinsol chewed more obnoxiously the more Jungeun ignored her. 

"I don’t know." Jungeun flipped the page. It was a catalog of floral prints that had gone stale five years ago, one she saved for nights like these: all drop flights canceled, an extra scoop of kidney beans for dinner, rain pattering on the single square window of their room. "It’s a floating hunk of rock in the sky. Doesn’t exactly scream _living sea organism_ , I guess?"

Jinsol sighed. "Then you lack imagination, Kim."

"Not my fault I had it flayed out of me by the public education system," Jungeun countered, burrowing her feet deeper. Winter had broke in a slurry of mudslides in the countryside, but their breaths no longer wreathed white while indoors, at least. 

"Fair enough," came her roommate's drowsy murmur. 

Jungeun half-considered prodding at the her childhood, replete with tutors and ballroom dancing and crinoline skirts like the ones detailed in front of her, but didn’t. _Look at you two, getting along so well,_ Jiwoo had whispered that morning, and Jungeun felt like she'd been caught robbing a store, arguing with Lieutenant Jung over the breakfast coffee like an old married couple. 

With a sigh of her own, she shut the fashion catalog with a sure thump, shoving it away. When she glanced over, there was an unmoving lump on the other bed, a few wisps of dark hair peeking out from under the sheets.

"Please don’t suffocate."

"...I won’t." Jinsol peered out. "Why? Scared your life would be dull without me?" Her eyes crinkled; spidery lashes casted shadows across her skin. 

"More like I’m scared someone will charge me of manslaughter and I’ll rot in prison for the rest of my life," said Jungeun, studying the cracks in the ceiling. "There’s no bird like a caged bird."

"Manslaughter? Give yourself some credit." Jinsol held out a hand. "People will think it’s calculated first-degree murder. Cool and crisp."

"Thanks," Jungeun said dryly, and accepted the proferred bundle of oily snacks.

*

The choice they gave her was this: dig a grave of debt to study zoology at the university, or enlist for a check in her family’s mailbox each month, all schooling free after her service was over. Jungeun, seeing her mother’s shell-pink hands from scrubbing the laundry of the rich five days a week, canning beer in the distillery on the sixth, submitted her paperwork on the eve of turning sixteen. 

Letters from home were filled with wheedling and _I-miss-you_ s from her younger siblings, with a page saved for last containing her mother’s halting cursive. Meat every other day, milk every day, schoolrooms for each of them, a day off to garden. Funds for a tunnel dug straight from their root cellar.

And so Jungeun shone her boots, ran laps in the sticky summer afternoons with the other cadets, learned how to wield a bayonet in a trench. She jogged in the middle of the pack, shot her rifle with adequate but unastounding accuracy. She neither failed nor aced her classes.

When the instructors took a dozen of them up in a whale blimp, she jumped, eyes screwed shut, not thinking anything besides a rush of queasiness and the howl of the wind, a mantra of reassurances that it would be over soon. 

Then her parachute bloomed behind her, and she opened her eyes. Looked down. 

*

The backdrop was this: the war between the Sky and the Earth had lasted for over a thousand years. 

The flocks descended, in pale storms like locusts, in ballasts wide as hot air balloons. Towns disappeared overnight; age-old domes shattered. Kings threw themselves at the feet of the angels and were trampled upon. Years could pass in peace before the bells clanged their feared rhythm once again and the world rushed underground, where safety was hewn from stone. 

The pilots arrived in a bellow of smoke at the end of her first year, tossing cadets pointed out by the sergeants into their cockpits. The bells had rung the day before. Jungeun remembered Yongsun’s pinched face, the sweat on her palms as she hoisted Jungeun into the cracked leather seat beside her, strapping the oxygen mask over with a startling gentleness. She remembered the chill of it, the mad rattling of the rivets as they flew high. She grasped the bare gist of Yongsun’s gestures: fuel gauge, accelerator. Yaw and pitch.

Clouds streaked past, scudding over the jeweled dragonfly wings of the aircraft. It was a frankenstein creation of membrane and aluminum, glucose broth and motor oil, a weapon against the heavens.

"Could you feel it breathing?" Yongsun had asked once they landed. The tarmac was bustling with olive-clad technicians and engineers. Beneath her cap and goggles, Yongsun had the head of bleach blond hair.

Jungeun looked at her, looked at the plane being whisked away, and slowly shook her head. 

"Neither did I, for a while." She had given Jungeun a rueful smile. "You’ll do, I suppose."

*

Jungeun wrenched off her mask, swallowing gulpfuls of cold, sulfurous air. She unclipped her seatbelts, twisted the ignition, and snapped open the hatch, stumbling toward Jinsol's smoldering plane.

"I’m alright, I’m alright," Jinsol coughed, batting Jungeun’s hands away. 

With a canister of foam, they snuffed out of the last of the embers. The windows had cracked, standing out in ripples. The joystick, once bumpy like the skin of a crocodile, was a waxen crisp. The vice around Jungeun’s chest would not let up. 

"Come on, it looks worse than it is," Jinsol said, seeing her face. She picked her way across the field, lifting a hand to shade her eyes toward the ongoing battle above.

Jungeun shook her head at the ash coating the back of Jinsol’s trousers, and followed. As they watched, Vivi shot down another envoy in a shower of iridescent dust, shrieks of the seraphims slicing through propeller and wingbeat alike.

"How is yours?" Jinsol asked, nodding at Jungeun’s plane.

Jungeun cleared her throat. "Nothing major. The engine’s still intact. A few rolls of saline tape should fix the rudder, if even that." 

"We could share it, going back." A teasing lilt crept into Jinsol’s voice. "No need to call a whale blimp."

"It’s a _one_ seater, Jinsol." A flash of Jinsol pressed against her back, bracketing Jungeun with her knees. Jungeun resented the heat that settled in her belly. She knew better than to take her flirtations seriously. 

Jinsol lifted a brow. "Desperate times call for desperate measures."

"Not _that_ desperate."

"Are you certain?"

"Besides," Jungeun said, humoring her, "They would want your scraps retrieved to build another one."

Still smiling, Jinsol acquiesced, tugging Jungeun to the stream to wash their hands and faces. The hillock they landed in teetered on the cusp of spring, dotted with snowdrops. 

Jinsol listed on her feet; Jungeun snatched up a hand to steady her. The bells had tolled that morning, then a skirmish erupted in the early afternoon, one mad dash to shield the land soldiers running the supply lines. Her shoulders trembled beneath Jungeun’s hand. Heart tight, Jungeun hobbled them over to sit at the roots of tree, feigning interest in the fight overhead to let Jinsol regain herself in peace.

As they sat, a chilly wind gusted through, and the sea of wild grass reeled before them. Jinsol would be clutching the opal brooch in her lap, a flower, the only trinket she allowed herself from her past. A brush with death was still a brush with death, even if she was the golden child of the corps and this was far from her first dogfight. 

*

She first saw the girl in the hangars, leaping from cockpit to asphalt with grace. 

The colonel giving the tour had greeted her by name— _Jung_ —and the junior pilots swirled around rumors about her, each more nonsensical than the last. She was the daughter of a merchant family who made their fortune in cinnamon. She could compute such vast sums in her head that the universities had begged to take her. She was engaged to an rising airman until it was discovered she could outfly him, and enlisted instead. She parachuted into the ocean and swam twenty miles—where she wrestled with a kraken—to get to shore.

The base was an hour away from Jungeun’s home city, sprawled out on a plateau that overlooked pastures and hamlets, hemmed in by a poplar forest that leafed out as a box of gold in autumn. Telegraph cables braided in with the trees. Rivers spooled into the lake at its center, a placid eye trained up at the sky.

Two years, it had been. Two years since a one-way train ticket had delivered Jungeun on the lichened cobblestones of the academy across the country. Two years since Jiwoo—a medical student, unafraid of blood—had coaxed her—homesick, delirious, overwhelmed with takeoffs at dawn, takeoffs at night, lecture halls melding together in the same shade of varnished wood, aeronautic equations spiraling in chalk dust—down to the beach where they stood on the wet sand and watched planes spear the skies and Jungeun breathed again. 

In this new place, suppertimes were lonely once again. Jiwoo, who had another year of medical school left, was not there to fill the space with her chatter. 

"You would think they would move, after all these years."

The voice rose from a nearby table. _The girl’s_ table. Jungeun's childhood, in starburst: the hunched backs of the oxherds, the cry of angels miles away, the sharp metallic taste of fear when the bells rang and someone she knew was waylaid outside the city walls. _Move with what money?_ Jungeun furiously thought. _With what livelihood?_ The fertile delta of the east fed the rest of the country, its harbors teeming with the halibut and oysters she imagined spread out on the Jungs’ lacquered dining table like pearls, admired, scarcely nibbled upon. 

She wanted to stand up, strangle them.

Another voice cut through. Jinsol’s. 

"You seriously think it’s that easy, Lee? Speak again when you can land without denting your plane."

A string of whistles and laughter, a frost seeping in. The pilot under scrutiny flushed and fumed. Jinsol’s back was to her, but Jungeun watched how the curve of her spine did not bend.

Later, when paired up with Sooyoung for the night patrol, Jungeun asked her about Jinsol.

"Oh, her? She’s alright, I suppose," Sooyoung said. With a fond snort, she snapped her spyglass closed and set to polishing the lens. "She flew the first gunnery I was assigned on. We graduated in the same year." 

"She's rather cold, isn't she?" The plane’s engine shut off in a low purr.

Sooyoung burst into laughter, the sound echoing in the hangar. "She's pretty foolish. In a certain way, I mean. She’s one of the best pilots we have, but she’s also like a maltese that won’t let go if you’re friends." She paused. "A puppy maggot?"

Jungeun looked up from inspecting the bat wings, appalled. The pilot with the biting words—a fluffy maggot. "Are we talking about the same person?" 

"Rest assured, we are." Sooyoung turned her attention to her rifle, uncorking a phial of solvent. "She takes some getting used to, I know."

Jungeun digested this, trying to reconcile warm friendliness with the Jinsol she saw marching somber through the base, dark-haired and lovely, picking seraphims clean out of the sky.

"I can introduce you, if you like," Sooyoung added, a suspicious tilt to her mouth. 

Jungeun’s gut gave a queasy swoop. "No—no, thank you."

*

A year, and Jungeun hunted the Sky army like second nature. They cycled her through the sleek crow scouters, the midweight interceptor, a diesel-guzzling bomber, before sticking her in a full circle to the dragonfly class. A plane that would be hers.

 _Told you. Had a sixth sense,_ Yongsun sent back when Jungeun wired her the news. Her mentor was off fighting at another front. _Fly well._

In August, Jiwoo arrived at the foot of the plateau, caduceus glinting on her shirtfront. 

"Ah, the great Manmyeon, in the flesh." Jiwoo pressed her face to the bus window, craning her neck to the cliffs above. Behind them, the tin roof of the train station shimmered with heat. "Have you had plenty of fun without me? Please say yes."

Jungeun pictured the battered copy of _Evolutionary Flight_ on her nightstand, its binding fraying at the ends. "Yes?" 

"Liar," she sighed. "Squandering your youth to the corps won’t do."

Jungeun elbowed her side. "I do it so the children of today can have _their_ youths."

"So noble," Jiwoo sang under her breath. She turned back to look at Jungeun, eyeing her up and down. Jungeun thought she looked better, ate better, since her academy days, but Jiwoo pursed her lips. "And how is combat treating you?"

Her first dogfight had been a blind wash of panic, though the takeoff had started simple enough: Jinsol just out of sight on her left wing, their formation leader leading them through the standard maneuvers. 

Then a seraphim loomed, bigger than a bear, feathers a smudged cream. A sentinel or a lone scout, searching for a drop site.

It had given their formation leader chase, clawed feet winking in the sunlight. A crackle through the radio: Jinsol shot off after it. And behind her, another seraphim leapt out of the cloud cover. 

Jungeun leapt into motion, alighting her on the second seraphim’s warpath after a frozen second. Her voice that was not hers calmly called out the threat to Jinsol, blood hammering in her ears. She drew her plane up, then down, then left. She caught the seraphim in her crosshairs on a wide turn. 

Her first kill disintegrated before her eyes. A moment later, Jinsol’s thanks came clear through the radio. 

"It’s getting easier each time," Jungeun replied, truthfully. Since then, the top brass paired the two of them together more often. Jungeun admitted they worked well, though Jinsol’s deftness on any plane meshed with anyone. The duty and terror melted into a thrill when weaving through the skies with her, that same heady exhilaration when the parachute unfurled and everything came into focus.

"I’m glad, then," Jiwoo said, sitting back, a cautious smile on her face. 

Jungeun relaxed as she launched into gossip from the academy, petty dramas, a graphic bout of food poisoning after Jungeun had left. The bus deposited them on base, and they grabbed plates at the canteen, talking into the night. Jiwoo had taken in the clumps of soldiers and staff strewn across the courtyard, chatting and smoking, and frowned. "How have you been in the way of making friends?"

*

Jungeun had been half expecting it, opening a door in the squeaky new barracks and seeing Jinsol unpacking inside.

Months of flying together, lives on the line, had made them ribbing acquaintances, rivals, almost. A bond of trust in the sky, a mere awareness on soil. They competed, one eye on the hit count, rarely speaking. Sometimes they would run into each other, nod and smile. Sometimes Jinsol would find her eyes across a boardroom and look away. A snide remark here and there.

Jungeun had not been expecting Jinsol’s reticence to have been shyness. 

A question about a brooch in her drawer led to a conversation on opal mining. A tentative lunch together drew out a heated discussion on snap peas, then deep-fried pork skins. Snow cloaking the trees and rooftops one morning became childhood stories, Jinsol bursting with remarks once Jungeun gave her own. 

Jungeun learned that her family made their fortune in dairy cows, a step less glamorous than the spice trade. That she was hopeless at arithmetic, but knew the path a glider would fall by instinct. She landed in the gulf once and almost drowned, if not for a passing navy ship. She escaped an engagement to a merchant prince who was later found to have poisoned his first wife. 

She told her this last part in the evening light with hushed tones, the two of them sitting shoulder to shoulder on Jungeun’s bed to watch the blimps take off on the horizon. _I could have died before I’d lived._ At the chill in her voice, Jungeun reached out before she could retreat, pressing their palms together.

*

The sodium lanterns swayed in the breeze, dim red ghosts hovering over the city streets. Peddlers plied their wares in the demon dark. Under peacetime, the markets would be glowing with lamplight. Tonight, with the bells silent for only a month, the citydwellers did their business in shadow.

"I think I almost stepped on someone," Jinsol hissed, too close, in her ear.

"Don’t mind them." Jungeun pushed them through a crush of people listening to a pair of violinists play. "They purposefully do that. A claim in the courts can feed a family for a while. Stay close."

She pinched Jungeun’s sleeve. "I’m trying. I haven’t grown eyes on my feet yet."

It was Jungeun's first furlough home. Twenty-one year old Jungeun was vastly different from sixteen-year old Jungeun, but her ability to weave through the canals and walkways remained intact. At the academy she had the excuse of distance between her and this city, but now, on the plateau, the reason was scant. _Next month,_ she would tell herself. And she would wile away the weekend pass in mindless card games with Yeosang and Yukhei and Jiwoo on base. Though her siblings had gradually gotten married or busied themselves elsewhere, her mother’s letters had never ceased; Jungeun kept them in the sideboard of her trunk, taking them out and smelling them for a whiff of chamomile.

They rounded a corner, crossed a bridge, and the street ribboned away to darkness. 

The oak trees have doubled in size, bare-branched from the winter. The front patios boarded up. Ivy had overrun the tavern and the houses next to it, spilling into the ditches. A spate of shops had sprouted up on one side, timber sagging against each other before the waterfront. Jungeun felt a lump lodge in her throat. 

At the end, her house. 

"Have you been home since you left?" she asked Jinsol.

"No." Jinsol thumbed her belt as she peered at the planters. The tulips were weeks out from sprouting. "They feel terrible about the whole marriage thing, of course. But I haven’t." 

Jungeun hadn’t written to say that she was coming. It shouldn’t matter. Maybe no one would answer. She stood there, weighing the three short steps to the front door. 

"It’s alright, you know." A click of a heel. Jinsol shifted to stand closer to her. Jungeun felt tentative fingers graze her shoulder. She breathed in the faint scent of standard-issue soap, a spritz of mint. They had braided up their hair and worn their formal uniforms for going out, Jinsol tagging along at Jungeun’s behest. 

"But I dreamed about going home," Jungeun said, looking down at her shiny boots, feeling like a child playing dressup. "Until I didn’t."

"I know."

"I don’t."

Mouth set in contemplation, Jinsol kicked at a loose pebble. "You won’t go back to the girl you were by going home. Whatever you’re thinking, you won’t lose all the strength you’ve built up." Her voice grew soft. "Crossing that doorway won’t erase what you’ve accomplished, Jungeun."

Jungeun stared at her.

"You’re too much of an obstinate ass for that, anyways." Jinsol smiled. "Also, close your mouth. It is most unbecoming."

*

Another day, another tarmac. Jinsol had bartered a pack of cigarettes for a jar of pickles from one of the cooks, and they polished them off on the grass.

"Would they stuff you back into skirts?"

Jinsol looked up sleepily in question. 

"If you went home," Jungeun clarified, thinking of the night in the city. Her youngest brother had opened the door, and their mother had come running, drawing Jungeun up with all the force of her tiny frame for an eternity. The scent of tea on letters was nothing compared to the source. Neither was seeing her family in person.

"No. They would feed me little lemon cakes and give me back my feather bed to lie in, and train me like a canary again."

"As if that worked the first time."

Jinsol snorted. "I suppose they’re optimistic, if nothing else."

"I bet you looked a fright in those gowns," Jungeun mused. She leaned back on her palms, considering the clouds rolling past. They were allotted a prized afternoon of self-study, which translated to horsing around and napping.

"Excuse you, I looked _amazing_."

Privately, Jungeun knew she did. Whether in their dress reds or everyday earthtone flight suits or brocade, Jinsol would always draw glances. Jungeun had witnessed many a soldier staring, hypnotized, in her wake. 

_When I joked that I hoped you would meet a handsome officer, I overlooked half of the population. I apologize,_ her mother had said between cups of tea, casting a glance at the doorway Jinsol left to use the outhouse, and Jungeun shushed her immediately, cheeks flaming. She had kissed a total of two people in her life, awkward fumblings, and never had she wanted so badly to protect a friendship.

Jiwoo flopped down beside them, as did Haseul, forehead dinted by the press of goggles in the biology laboratories. She tossed a pulp paperback into Jinsol’s lap, and the two of them bent over it. 

"The latest batch of fresh meat?" Jiwoo nodded at the artillery soldiers on the practice range. Though her stance was casual, Jungeun knew she was sneaking looks at Sooyoung leading the drill. 

"Let’s not call them that," Jungeun half-heartedly said. Jeon Heejin had flown with her and Jinsol’s formation yesterday, executing rolls in neat strokes.

"‘Young blood?’"

"Maybe."

Jiwoo fished out a spear of pickle. Late nights in the operating theater had left her eyes bloodshot. "Spit it out. What’s bothering your tiny brain?"

"The usual," said Jungeun. "Am I going to fall out of the sky to my doom today, are we going to be overrun soon, et cetera."

"Mhm." She lowered her voice. "Do these problems include roommates and fellow pilots who shall not be named but may be in our vicinity at this moment?"

"Not you, too," Jungeun groaned. She closed her eyes, shaking her head at Jiwoo’s eager noise of askance. "Nothing."

Sometimes, she thought she felt Jinsol’s gaze on her. Bundled in one bed in the middle of winter, when the radiators shorted out. Touches a beat too slow in skittering away. She wanted to confront her; she wanted to never speak of it.

"Whatever, or _who_ ever it is," said Jiwoo in the same low tone, "Remember we could be squashed any day. You in your claustrophobic metal shells."

"Thanks, tell that to Sooyoung," Jungeun muttered, drawing her knees to her chest. 

"Believe me, I already have." Jiwoo winked. 

Across the field, the drill ended. The soldiers were dismantling the clay targets, putting away the mortars. Sooyoung caught sight of Jiwoo, waved, and Jiwoo, despite her blustering, blushed pink.

*

"On your tail, Dragon Four. A pair coming up from starboard—"

Jungeun angled down, holding her breath as her plane lurched into a steep dive. The seraphims streaked past, spitting acid, missing her by a margin. 

Below, the swarm—the _itty-bitty angels_ , the other pilots dubbed them, along with other choice words—continued to flutter around them. Though much of the Earth’s harvest changed to certain foodstuffs—currants, beets, and mushrooms, plenty of mushrooms—during times of war, the amount of salt the swarm carried in their bellies spelled ruin in the fields for decades to come.

She sent out a spray of machine gun fire, felt her plane shudder as the springs clicked back into place. 

Jinsol flew a gunnery, its copper plates a blaze in the corner of her eye. The riflemen on board lobbed spheres of petrol into the fray. She glimpsed Hyunjin and Sooyoung, sleeves rolled up, brows filmed with sweat, and launched herself at the next swarm. 

Refueling was a harried affair, ladles of wellwater and sludge black coffee pressed into their hands. The front was close to breaking. Angels eluded the floodlights to drop regiments under the cover of the new moon. The nearby towns have been warned to seal themselves underground. The poplar forest, once placid, rumbled under the weight of tanks.

Jungeun flew her dragonfly day and night until the engineers towed it away. She hurtled through the skies on the wings of a vulture, then duralumin, baked in brown paint. Spring rains drizzled down in bursts.

Neither Earth nor Sky relented. 

On the third day, the front reversed its slow crawl forward. Angel and human alike grappled in the trenches. 

On the fifth day, a seraphim crashed through Jungeun’s windshield. She bailed out into the lake and tread water to shore. 

On the seventh night, she woke up to see Jinsol standing at the windowsill, sipping cold tea. 

Jungeun threw off the sheets to stand beside her. 

"It’s over." There were bruises beneath Jinsol’s eyes, a cut on her nose. "They’ve retreated. For now."

Jinsol slid her the cup, and Jungeun took it. Parched, she gulped down the concoction of sugar and milk they both liked, relief and exhaustion coating her insides. For a week Jinsol had only been a call sign on her radio. A plane in her mirrors. 

Beyond the watchtowers, the moon lanced the sky. The swarms had been burned, or driven back. The fields would lay ready for the planting season—if the angels gave the farmers a chance to emerge aboveground long enough and sow it. 

"We should fly to the desert one day. I always wanted to see a date palm and eat cactus fruit," Jinsol said. 

"Us and what plane?" The closest desert was in the kingdom to the south, leagues away. 

Jinsol shrugged, knocking their ankles together. "I’m sure they’ll let us borrow one."

Jungeun blew out a laugh, feeling a part of her thaw after days in the air. "And who will fly it?"

"We’ll take shifts, obviously. Now that I think about it, we can do a loop around the world on a trusty steed. Break a record or two."

"Bold of you to assume I would go with you."

Jinsol twisted to look at her, expression unreadable. The faint light in their room lent her an otherworldly quality—Cupid’s bow stark, hollows at her throat. Hair, chopped rough by the military barbers, tucked behind the shell of her ear. 

Her voice was clear. "Would you not?"

Jungeun set the cup down. 

She did not know who moved first. Only that their lips brushed together, all the air forced from her lungs. When they drifted apart, Jinsol’s eyes were spindles of darkness. Jungeun lifted a hand to cup her cheek. 

And Jinsol leaned in again, pinning Jungeun against the plaster wall, their lips sliding together. A palm curled around her waist.

Jungeun’s hands crumpled, limp, between their chests. Jinsol kissed her thoroughly, in a way she had not been kissed before. Jungeun lost herself in their shared warmth, struggling to keep up, the wall solid behind her, months of unspoken attraction drawn out in a rush. She was lost, going willingly.

*

With fanfare, the air marshal arrived the following Friday.

The windows were steamed from the crowd crammed into the hall, grates stoked with fire. They lined up in their dress reds and polished boots, the mud-colored silk of the royal flag rippling behind the podium. Beside her, Yunho was shifting in his overstarched trousers. A glance showed Vivi to be valiantly keeping from dozing off on her feet. Jungeun resisted the urge to yawn.

She had soaked in the baths for an hour that first morning, scrubbing the grease and sweat off her skin in numb bewilderment. She was alive. She was clean. Jinsol had kissed her. With heavy limbs, she donned her crimson uniform, cinched the belt closed, and joined the crowd lighting candles for the funeral biers outside. Afterwards, she had squeezed into bed with Jinsol again and they slept some more.

Now, the officers moved down the line and fastened quartz to their fronts, speaking of The Battle of the Salt, how the king in his cavern court sent his praises. 

They stood stock-still as the camera flashed and preserved their worn faces in black and white for the papers. She wondered if her family would see it. At last, they were set free.

"Use your fork - like this, you heathen." Jinsol demonstrated on her own oyster, leaning in to be heard over the clamor.

Jungeun tore a pitiful chunk of meat out. "We should just have chicken. Chicken sounds nice. And cuttable."

Jinsol grinned, spearing a baby corn with her knife. "It’s only when the higher-ups are visiting. It’ll be back to onions and porridge before you know it."

"I’m not sure I want to kiss onion breath," Jungeun said around her mouthful. Around them, the soldiers and pilots broke out barrels of malt beer. Heejin and Hyunjin had found bottles of aged champagne from the stores and were pouring into any glass or bowl offered up. 

"Garlic it is, then," Jinsol said, uncowed. She rested a foot between Jungeun’s. Casually, like Jungeun’s heart didn’t threaten to burst whenever she so much as looked at her.

*

On the heels of summer, the Earth struck back. Orders sat as stones in their pockets. In a few hours, the trains would arrive and scatter their plateau to smaller bases. Quicker responses, aerial support for the ground armies. It was a new strategy, one where the king and his generals bid them onto the different sides of the land. Trunks were packed and locked, beds stripped bare. Jungeun tried not to feel too bitter about it. 

_The dream team is dissolved,_ Jiwoo had lamented when the news first broke, one draught of rum too many. She would be shuttled between field camps, Sooyoung off to the west. _They don’t know what they undid._

Jungeun kissed Jinsol hard before they parted at their room. 

"Don’t forget - we have a romantic date under the date palms," Jinsol said, in lieu of a goodbye. "Under the sun."

Jungeun held her hands and looked away. "Just _go_ already—" 

*

_The winds made it hard to steer, at first. I got the stink-eye from the flight lieutenant for landing his precious dragonfly too hard, but you fly it far better than him, anyways. Sooyoung says hello._

_(!) Tell me how pretty your forest is. We have nothing but rusty silos and chicken wire for miles. I may have to resort to writing sonnets._

Jungeun leaned on the dirt wall tunneling down to the comms office, letter in hand, the bare electric bulbs humming above her. The forest surrounding the base was more of a swamp, peat frogs chirruping out of sight, birds in tired gray plumage pecking the ground for seeds. A handful of familiar faces were there with her: Hyunjin and Mark, Donghyuck and Handong. The rest were old crew, accustomed to the humidity and the flies, there for a fuel pump or a screwdriver or a kernel of complaint against the syrupy heat. 

She picked up Choi Yerim on their landing field, fresh-faced from the academy. 

"Sorry you drew the short end of the stick," Jungeun said to say something, watching sweat bead on her arms.

"Did I? I’m here to learn, aren’t I?" Yerim replied, giving her a blinding smile that Jungeun thought was feigned before she learned, over the next few weeks, that it was a hundred-percent genuine. _What did Yongsun see when she first saw me,_ Jungeun often wondered. 

The waiting dragged on, punctuated with midnight dogfights over the neighboring parishes. She wrote letters in the light of the tunnel and flipped through outdated fashion magazines, traded a few with Yerim. Out of boredom, she tried to smoke a cigarette in her cabin and coughed for ages. 

Jinsol’s poetry was atrocious, and scarcely rhymed, but brought Jungeun lurid joy whenever they came. She imagined the petulant pout on her face when she penned back her thoughts. Sketches of lizards in the margins. She told her of Yerim, who Jinsol immediately wanted to adopt. She told her of minnows in the tide pools, the time Donghyuck and Mark bickered until they both pitched into the swamp, and the memory of snow. 

She did not tell her that she missed her ticklish neck kisses. She did not tell her how she flinched awake in the middle of the night and listened for another person’s breathing that wasn’t there. In her sweeter dreams, they would be entwined: Jinsol above her, Jungeun’s back arching off the mattress, moans muffled into her shoulder. Jinsol beneath her, unbound hair shining on a pillow, fingers trailing down to finally rest on her tailbone. 

_You’re beautiful,_ she had whispered. 

Whenever the casualty lists went up, Jungeun always knew the world would tip beneath her feet, and, with sheer luck, right itself again.

*

The moon was a jellyfish, Jungeun saw. Its face peeked through in bursts, rising then sinking as her plane glided through the milk fog. It trailed after her, bright between the vapors. Either being around Jinsol long enough had addled her brains, or the other girl had a poetic streak after all. 

Under the hail of fire, the last seraphim of the night crumbled away. For an minute, Jungeun let herself free-fall, propellers spinning, the earth tinged with the rosy dawn. 

She guided the plane down. Soldiers across the mud were lifting their weapons to the sky, cheering for the latest battle won. Whether the war was ending for good or this was only a pause in the action, she would accept it with open hands. 

A jellyfish, she thought, looking up. _Really._ She smiled, unhooking the straps from her arms and the mask from her chin.

The pass for her next furlough was in her room, signed and stamped, wedged between yellowing pages of _Evolutionary Flight_. Across the country, Jinsol saved one as well, her recent letters dotted with exclamation points and twirls. A date was marked on each of their calendars. 

She would have to ask her to elaborate, the next time she saw her. 

**Author's Note:**

> an attempt at loona fic - hopefully it's alright!
> 
> insp. from the _leviathan_ series, _dunkirk_ , _shingeki no kyojin_ , and, of course, the one [# photoshoot](https://loonatheworld.fandom.com/wiki/Hash#Gallery).


End file.
